In queasy acceptance of the fact that the most noxious week in American history has now officially begun, I’ve decided to post the most noxious musical numbers ever filmed. What better way to kick things off than with this stinker from ‘The Goldwyn Follies’ (1938) featuring the wildly unfunny Ritz
In December, 1929 the above remarkable footage was shot in the Times Square Theater during rehearsals of the Gershwin show ‘Strike Up The Band’. I’ve posted this before but every so often I rewatch it and am freshly amazed at what a rare and peculiar document it is. In it,
In 1931 George and Ira Gershwin went to Hollywood for the first time to compose the score for a Janet Gaynor/Charlie Farrell musical called ‘Delicious’. No popular songs of any particular note came out of this endeavor but, Gershwin being Gershwin, a symphonic masterwork somehow snuck its way into existence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnAEHFhxuQIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxNbAtTMZXc Yesterday I posted a 1929 art film by Robert Florey called ‘Skyscraper Symphony’. Above is the experimental film he made the year before in collaboration with montage artist and film theorist Slavko Vorkapich called…well, read the title of this post. There’s a good deal to understand about how the
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BJQViP16lAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU6fY1wMTd4 Robert Florey is the supreme instance of a professional filmmaker whose dissatisfaction with commercial assignments led him into parallel work as an avant-garde independent. He began his career as a film critic and journalist in the early 1920s and came to some small prominence by making a very cheap
As a jazz pianist–in other words as a decrepit hipster wallowing in a musical genre that few people care about anymore–I should find it easy to mock the ‘easy listening’ pianists of the 1950s and 60s as total squares who sold-out for big money, playing unbelievably sappy and simple arpeggio-ridden
Here’s an outstanding reel of home movie footage shot by Ira Gershwin featuring a veritable who’s who of 1930s cultural heroes. Much of it was filmed at the house that Ira and George shared at 1019 N. Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. (It was later occupied by Rosemary Clooney and
Here’s an extraordinary piece of film. Apparently in December 1929, footage was captured of George Gershwin at rehearsals of his show ‘Strike Up The Band’, complete with chorus girls and a pre-rehearsed patter with star comedians Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough. We see George playing the piano as well as
Yesterday I posted a terrific clip of Fred Astaire dancing with the divine Paulette Goddard from the movie ‘Second Chorus’ (1941). The six-degrees of Paulette Goddard takes us now back four years to 1937 when Goddard met and began an affair with George Gershwin, who was in Hollywood writing the